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Total number of comments: 14 (since 2011-08-15 23:36:36)

MichaelSmith

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• Aharon Appelfeld's rage at the German language (and Arendt's need for it)
  • MichaelSmith May 20, 2012 at 3:05 pm

    As you say, Appelfeld comes from Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy, a city that was successively Austrian, Romanian, Soviet, and Ukrainian. His ties to German may not be that strong. Then again, Paul Celan, a Jewish writer from the city who's parents died in Nazi labor camps wrote in German and is considered the great postwar German poet. But Appelfeld may have been thinking of Celan's unhappy end. Perhaps he thought a clean break preferable to living with ghosts and regrets.

    Given that Appelfeld writes mostly about European Jews in the interwar years, it's both expected and a bit odd that he writes in Hebrew. With that subject matter it's expected that he'd want to make a break with that world, but he must be aware that writing about a German- or Yiddish-speaking world in Hebrew may give a different color or texture to experiences.

    Has anyone read Appelfeld's latest? “Until the Dawn’s Light,” written in the nineties and only published in English last year. From the reviews it seemed like tired stuff, though like much that he wrote it's certainly relevant to the concerns expressed here.

• 'J Post' says David Remnick is 'conflicted' and 'born of Jewish parents'
  • MichaelSmith May 1, 2012 at 2:38 pm with 1 replies

    Hackensack is suburban and funny-sounding. Writing that Remnick comes from there is definitely a put-down.

    I wonder how much of the New Yorker's current position grows out of Remnick-Hertzberg dualism. My theory is that Remnick and the magazine fell under the influence of his political editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, and what appears in the magazine reflects Hertzberg's influence or Remnick's struggles to escape it.

    Remnick's original field of interest was Russian and the Soviet Union. He wasn't that concerned with American politics. In my theory, the articles on domestic politics reflect Hertzberg's thinking. Articles on Israel and the Middle East would fall into the gray area in between Hertzberg's interests and Remnick's.

    It's just a theory, though, and perhaps impossible to verify (in so far as what you can't ascribe to Hertzberg's influence you can attribute to Remnick's efforts to break free and remain his own man).

• On the passing of Novick: the political limitations of 'The Holocaust in American Life'
  • MichaelSmith March 25, 2012 at 3:17 pm

    I think you've read the quote accurately, but with the proper "scare quotes" inserted, with "God" to mean the idea of the Biblical God, it's something a secularist or universalist could say. Foxman most likely didn't intend it that way, but the bare words aren't inconsistent with much "God is dead" holocaust theology.

• Jack Ross in Brooklyn tonite-- on Elmer Berger and the 'foreign nationalism' of Zionism
  • MichaelSmith January 26, 2012 at 2:14 pm

    I look forward to reading the book. But consider how much the US has changed since 1950. That old insular America is gone.

    Ethnic self-awareness and assertiveness and multicultural ideology mean that the older way of single overpowering loyalties doesn't carry the force that it once did.

    You can see this idea of cultural pluralism or "transnational America" beginning with Randolph Bourne and early American Zionist Horace Kallen a century ago.

    For good or ill, rich imperial America seems almost to demand to be treated as something more than a nation or state in the ordinary sense, and the idea of the United States as a "nation of nations" allows for multiply loyalties of the sort that Zionism exemplifies. Whether it should or not is different from whether it in fact does.

• Columbia U book on Iraq war suggests Wolfie, Feith, Wurmser and Perle had 'Israeli interests, not just U.S. interests at heart'
  • MichaelSmith December 21, 2011 at 8:27 pm

    "Author Paul Pillar has a stellar Establishment reputation."

    That makes him ... "Pillar, of the Establishment"?

• 'The Social Network' and the Acceptance World
  • MichaelSmith December 18, 2011 at 3:49 pm

    Young people who are cynically rising up the system and young people who have become cynical about the system and reject it: are they the same people? Is it the same phenomenon? Are there two groups or one? Do young occupiers and young entrepreneurs feel some kinship to one another? Is one kind of cynicism likely to increase and the other to decline in the future?

    There may be some support for your argument in the response to Steve Jobs's passing. Very different groups of people with very different values took him for a hero. But this undercuts the idea that today's young are different. Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg were not so very different, were they?

    Also, what do you mean by "the acceptance world"? Yes, it's a book title, but what does it mean and how are you using it?

• Is portrait of Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network' anti-Semitic?
  • MichaelSmith December 19, 2011 at 6:19 pm with 1 replies

    You're picking up on the ethnically-coded materials, but they doesn't wholly define or describe the Zuckerberg character. Or do they? I suppose if you're more sensitive to those things they might, but is it a kind of bigotry to see a character only in an ethnic light, to see the Jewishness in computer whiz as dominating over other characteristics?

    So much of the film reflects Aaron Sorkin's own preoccupations. Here's an article attacking him for misogyny and demeaning Jewish women. And here's one arguing that he really takes the side of Zuckerberg as the Jewish upstart who comes out on top in the end.

    Maybe Sorkin's the liberal arts grad who is repelled by the single-mindedness and social cluelessness of the successful technological entrepreneur, yet also a little proud of the success of someone from a similar background. If Aaron Sorkin has a developed self-consciousness he probably can't help seeing something of himself in Mark Zuckerberg.

  • MichaelSmith December 18, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    "It reminds me of this recent article in Commentary by a very old Jew."

    John Steele Gordon is now a senior citizen, almost part of that "Mad Men" generation, but it's not clear that he's Jewish. Judging from his background, Millbrook School and Vanderbilt, two grandfathers on the New York Stock Exchange, he may actually be one of those hated WASPs, or if part-Jewish, he's very assimilated.

    You didn't have to be Jewish to end up hating John Lindsay.

  • MichaelSmith December 17, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Good topic, but sometimes a film character is just a film character. I don't doubt that the movie's Zuckerberg isn't exactly the real Mark Zuckerberg. Liberties were taken both to make the story more dramatic and to include the film makers' own preoccupations.

    The obsession with final clubs was Aaron Sorkin's. Maybe you can go to Exeter and Harvard today without taking much interest in old WASP institutions and rituals, but you can't write an Ivy-related success story and escape the influence of Fitzgerald and Gatsby. If Zuckerberg had been preoccupied with making Porcellian or Fly or Spee, he wouldn't have invented Facebook (or whatever it was he did that got him all that money).

    But anti-Semitic? No, a film portrayal of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates might have been similar, stressing the nerdish, anti-social aspects and ruthlessness, without being anti-Arab or anti-WASP.

    The Summers' portrait, though, was interesting. It didn't look entirely believable. How accurate was it? Has Harvard ever had a president like that before?

• Lauren Pierce needs a history lesson
  • MichaelSmith November 19, 2011 at 2:38 pm

    See George Orwell on direct and transferred nationalism. Orwell considered Zionism a direct nationalism because he assumed that only Jews would be passionate about Zionism and that Zionist Jews would want to live in Palestine/Israel. Even in his own day, he was wrong in those assumptions.

    Today, among both American Jews and American gentiles, Zionism is a powerful form of transferred nationalism. It's certainly stronger than the kinds of exoticism and cultural nostalgia that Orwell relegated under that label. One is free to speculate as to what Lauren Pierce's Zionist enthusiasm is "really about": Israel, the Jews, the Bible, America, Christianity, Texas, or something else.

• Saul Bellow didn't like WASPs
  • MichaelSmith November 13, 2011 at 1:59 pm

    Did Bellow become more bitter with age or just more set in his ways? Some people grow older and come to relish being difficult and embattled. They aren't embittered; they positively thrive on their enmities. Hatred or anger or argumentativeness is toxic when combined with failure, but can be a tonic for those who don't feel that they've failed.

    Bellow clearly did have trouble with women. You can read Vivian Gornick's analysis of Bellow's and Roth's misogyny. She sees it as a way of maintaining that sense of being in the minority, of struggling against the odds. Having won success, Bellow and Roth set up the women in their lives as the oppressor figures, and thus kept the vitality and energy of their earlier years. Gornick would see Bellow's grudge against the old WASP establishment and his hostility to women as two aspects of the same complex.

    But of course, Bellow wouldn't have seen things that way. Samuel Johnson called second marriages "the triumph of hope over experience." Something similar could be said for third, fourth, and fifth marriages. Bellow, so we're told, was happy with Janis, his last wife. It may not have lasted if he'd lived longer, but disillusionment hadn't yet set in.

  • MichaelSmith November 10, 2011 at 3:31 pm with 56 replies

    I was under the impression that Bellow -- well, mellowed as he grew older, but there's always the temptation in the old to return to return to their "greatest hits" and reopen old wounds.

    See this interview (if that's what it was) with Harold Bloom -- link to thejewishweek.com

    “Christianity? Christianity?” he said in a recent phone interview, when asked about his views on the Christian interpretation of Judaism. “The New Testament is a violently anti-Semitic reading of the Hebrew Bible.”
    Interfaith groups that try to patch over the differences today, he went on, do so in vain: “Christianity is our enemy. It’s an uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to deal with. It’s a ghastly religion founded on the cross, a symbol of torture.”

    If it's legit, it's not exactly what you'd expect someone to have gleaned from a lifetime of wide and close reading, but in old age many return to the comforting prejudices of youth.

• For neoconservatives, Israel is a foreign and domestic issue
  • MichaelSmith October 24, 2011 at 3:04 pm with 1 replies

    Reading the excerpt I was going to object that Luban left the Cold War out of his account, but if you read the whole article it's very much present.

    It's not like neoconservative ideas about the Middle East evolved in a vacuum. On the contrary, a lot of their thinking had roots in the liberal anti-Communism of the post-WWII period.

    Separating out what was specifically Jewish or Zionist or Israel-oriented from wider Cold War concerns and determining which was more important at one time or another isn't always easy.

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Middle Eastern concerns came to prevail among neocons, while many of their Cold War allies didn't always come to share that perspective.

• Nationalism reduced religious tolerance in Middle East
  • MichaelSmith October 24, 2011 at 2:49 pm with 1 replies

    Nationalism was closely tied to democracy and "modernization." And to religion as well. Greeks, Romanians, and Bulgarians wanted national states that would represent their own cultures. Imitation of Western states had much to do with it, as did the sense of being Christian and perhaps even "European." So religion was in a sense present at the beginning of the process, and this was well before WWI and the British and French became major powers in the region.

    You can see a parallel between Traub and those who are nostalgic for the Hapsburg monarchy. The Ottomans and Hapsburgs weren't the worst of rulers. It's hard to argue that the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy wasn't better than what Central Europe would see in the mid-20th century. But it's also hard to see how the Hapsburgs or Ottomans could have lasted into an age of democratic and nationalist passions. The older monarchical and aristocratic trans-national power structure was so different from the ideas that were on the rise that it's hard to see how a crack-up could have been avoided.

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